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Home , 2016 in art, Carlo Carra, Francesco Somaini, Metaphysical painting, Return to order, Valori plastici

METAPHYSICAL MASTERPIECES STUDY DAYS Friday, April 26 & Saturday, , 2019

CIMA – Center for Italian 421 Broome Street, 4th floor, NYC

Renato Barilli • Erica Bernardi • Filippo Bosco • Caterina Caputo • Carlotta Castellani • Damian Dombrowski • Mia Fuller • Emanuele Greco • Irena Kossowska • Nicol Mocchi • Simona Storchi • Maria Elena Versari

wifi network: Amplifi • password: Paolini1940

Friday, April 26

10 am – 10.30am Metaphysical Masterpieces exhibition viewing and registration

Welcome by Emma Lewis, Executive Director of CIMA

10.30am – 1pm From Collecting to Exhibiting Metaphysical (Chair: Carlotta Castellani) Followed by Q&A

Emanuele Greco (University of , ) The origins of an ambiguity: considerations on the exhibition strategies of metaphysical in the exhibits of the group “”, 1921-1922

The magazine Valori Plastici, published in between 1918 and 1922 under the direction of Mario Broglio, had a decisive role in the European artistic context after WWI. It presented the works of an innovative group of Italian artists including , , , , Arturo Martini and Edita Broglio, who worked to rediscover the roots of their own artistic languages in the Italian Medieval and traditions. The magazine was a remarkable medium for the international spread of , that took place when the artists more connected to this style outdistanced themselves from it in favor of a more naturalistic pictorial language. In fact, Valori Plastici presented metaphysical painting both as an innovative language of the avant-garde and as well as a language that followed the Italian artistic tradition. The proposal highlights this ambiguous interpretation of metaphysical painting given by Valori Plastici. Analyzing the exhibition activity of Valori Plastici, with an emphasis on the 1921 tour in , and the participation at the Fiorentina Primaverile in Florence in 1922, it will show how Broglio intended to present metaphysical painting during the exhibits of Valori Plastici, and how it was a strategic move to describe the language of to the public in different ways.

Emanuele Greco, who received a PhD in at the University of Florence (Italy), specializes in and critics of the 20th Century. His PhD thesis looked at the reconstruction of the cultural context that surrounded the Fiorentina Primaverile, an important exhibition of Italian that took place in Florence in 1922 with a significant focus on the participation of the group “Valori Plastici.” He also studied the exhibition of African at the in 1922, as well as artists like Giorgio de Chirico, Edita Broglio, Alberto Viani, Francesco Somaini. Moreover, he researched Italian art critics such as Roberto Salvini, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Giorgio Castelfranco, ultimately curating the re-publishing of Castelfranco's book La pittura moderna (1934). Several of his articles have appeared in magazines like “Annali di Critica d'Arte,” “L'Uomo Nero,” “StudiOnLine” and “Artista.”

Caterina Caputo (CIMA fellow) Building an Identity for Italian Contemporary Art during the Fascist Ventennio: the case of Rino Valdameri’s Collection

Rino Valdameri was born in Crema in 1889. After graduating in law at the University of he became a lawyer and moved to where he worked and lived during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1922, he entered the National Fascist Party, and he remained politically involved with until its fall in 1943. Valdameri was involved in the cultural environment of Milan and, from 1936 to 1940, he directed the Reale Academia of Brera and was a member of the Poldi- Pezzoli Foundation. In this paper, I will reconstruct the history of his large collection of contemporary Italian art and the collecting taste of Valdameri who, in just two decades, assembled more than 450 artworks. Among Valdameri’s favorite artists there were Giorgio Morandi, Giorgio de Chirico, and Carlo Carrà, whom he considered to be at the forefront of international modern art. Valdameri collected with a specific purpose since he aimed to contribute to shape an Italian contemporary art as well as create a national, and international, art market for it.

Caterina Caputo received her PhD (Doctor Europaeus) from the University of Florence, Pisa, and Siena. Her work addresses topics at the crossway of collecting, art market, cultural dissemination, and transnational exchanges related to , Avant-gardes, and . She worked as a tutor at the University of Florence, where she also took part in academic research groups. Caterina has been awarded the University of Florence financial grant for publishing her book Collezionismo e mercato. La Gallery e la diffusione dell’arte surrealista, 1938-1950 (Firenze: Pontecorboli, 2018). She has presented papers in several international conferences in and the U.S., and published articles on Surrealism, Giorgio de Chirico, and collecting in academic journals, including "Ricerche di storia dell'arte, "Archivio dell'arte metafisica: Studi OnLine," and “Passages” of the German Center of Art History of ; she is contributing to the "Art Market Dictionary" (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). In 2017 and 2018 she participated in the École de printemps (the International Consortium on Art History) and to the Centre Pompidou Summer School. Recently, Caterina has been awarded the Leon Levy postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection, where she studied Gordon Onslow Ford’s Surrealist Collection (forthcoming publication).

Nicol Mocchi (Soprintendenza, Milan) Metaphysical Art in James Thrall Soby’s travel notebooks

My paper will focus on the travel notebooks of the American critic and art collector James Thrall Soby, head of the Department of Painting and at the in New York, written in the spring of 1948 during his trip to Italy accompanied by the director of the museum collections Alfred H. Barr, Jr. The purpose of this trip was to select Italian contemporary artworks from public and private galleries, as well as the main Italian art collectors (Frua De Angeli, Boschi, Jucker, Jesi, Rollino, Castelfranco, and Feroldi), which would be featured at the first major North-American exhibition, after the fall of fascism, entitled Twentieth-century Italian Art in 1949. The analytical study of these notebooks, enriched by a series of interesting sketches, will especially focus on the choices made and opinions expressed by Soby on the art of some of the major Italian artists variously related to the so-called “Metaphysical School,” including Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, besides those of Alberto Savinio and . This paper will examine the role of Italian art collecting in spreading twentieth-century Italian

art, especially Metaphysical Art, and how it was perceived in the United States after World War II.

Nicol Mocchi is an Italian art historian specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. She deals specifically with the connections and exchanges between different visual cultures. Since 2010, she has been collaborating with the Archivio dell’Arte Metafisica and with Milan’s Superintendence for Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape. In 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art, where she researched the reception, visual success and critical fortune of Giorgio Morandi’s work in the United States, leading up to the 1950s. She has recently published a book entitled The Culture of the de Chirico Brothers at the Dawn of Metaphysical Art (Milan: Scalpendi editore, 2017).

Erica Bernardi (CIMA fellow) “Intellectual lucubrations:” Lamberto Vitali, Giorgio Morandi and Metaphysical art

Why didn’t Lamberto Vitali praise the artistic products of Morandi’s metaphysical phase as he did for works completed at other moments of the artist’s career? In Vitali’s writings on Morandi – in, for example, the different editions of his catalogue raisonné – the art historian doesn’t explicitly declare a preference. However, there is an evident a change in the way he discusses the works of the artist’s metaphysical years (1918–1919). For instance, when he writes about the artist’s landscapes painted in the following years, between 1921 and 1925, he claims that they have a “tender sweetness in the representation, very far from the intellectual lucubrations of the Metaphysical ." This apparently banal and marginal question allows us, on the contrary, to consider Vitali’s reading of Morandi’s œuvre with a far broader perspective for which it becomes pivotal to take into consideration the collecting taste of the time. Through this reading of Vitali’s texts and of Morandi’s images, as well as an analysis of the contemporary market tendencies, it becomes possible to define the cultural reasons underlying Vitali’s taste.

Erica Bernardi received her Ph.D. from the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice. Her research focuses on Franco Russoli, the art historian, museologist, and director of the in Milan; most recently she published the book Senza utopia non si fa la realtà. Scritti sul museo 1952-1977, based on her PhD dissertation. She is currently the curator of the Franco Russoli archive and collection, and collaborates with the Brera on historical research projects. She is also coordinating a work team regarding contemporary museology for ICOM – Italy. After writing a specialization thesis on Gaudenzio Ferrari and the North Italian Renaissance, she ended up studying the criticism of the twentieth century—catalyzed by her work with Russoli’s archive. Her first project was the catalogue of La Raccolta Berenson (1962); during an internship at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University, she developed what became La nascita del Fogg museum nella corrispondenza Forbes-Berenson (1915-1928). She also catalogued and put online historical photographs from Berenson’s family archive.

1pm – 2.30pm: lunch break

2.30 – 5pm Crossing Borders: Dialogues through Magazines (Chair: Caterina Caputo) Followed by Q&A

Simona Storchi (University of Leicester, UK) Metaphysical Networks, Metaphysical Writing: Artistic Theorization and Modernist Magazines 1918-1922

This paper will look at the extensive theorization carried out by the artists involved in the Metaphysical movement between 1918 and 1922. Focusing in particular on the magazines La Raccolta, Valori Plastici, La Ronda, and Il Convegno, published in the crucial years between the end of and the rise of Fascism (with the exception of Il Convegno, which was published between 1920 and 1939), the paper will analyze essays and articles published in these magazines by Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, and Filippo de Pisis. It will explore how these key writings contributed to the theorization of Metaphysical art and consider their essential role in shaping the artistic debate in Italy in the years of the so-called ‘.’ It will also assess the reception of Metaphysical art in Italy at the time of its development, as well as its connections with literature, and it will contextualize the debates within different regional and national cultural milieux (La Raccolta was published in Bologna, Valori Plastici and La Ronda in Rome, and Il Convegno in Milan). Finally, it will explore the role played by Metaphysical writing in the demise of avant-garde and in the promotion of a revision of the relationship between art and politics, which saw a reconceptualization of the classical as central to the redefinition of postwar national culture. It will discuss the political implications attached to the redefinition of the idea of the classical in the postwar context, with particular reference to the centrality attributed to Italy in the renewal of European art.

Simona Storchi is an Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Leicester. She has published extensively on early twentieth-century Italian literature and culture and on the relationship between art and politics under the fascist regime. Her publications include: Valori Plastici 1918–1922. Le inquietudini del Nuovo classico (monographic supplement to The Italianist, 2006); Beyond the Piazza. Public and Private Spaces in Modern Italian Culture (Peter Lang, 2013); Back to the Futurists. The Avant-Garde and its Legacy, ed. with Elza Adamowicz (Manchester University Press, 2013); The Great War and the Modernist Imagination in Italy, ed. with Luca Somigli (themed issue of Annali d’Italianistica, 2015); Visualizzare la Guerra. L'iconografia del conflitto e l'Italia, ed. with Giuliana Pieri and Maria Giuseppina Di Monte (Mimesis, 2016); Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy. Essays for Sharon Wood, ed. with Marina Spunta and Maria Morelli (Troubador, 2017). She is currently completing two monographs: one on the ‘return to order’ in Italy between the end of WW1 and the rise of Fascism and one on Massimo Bontempelli and Italian culture between the wars. She is the Italian Section Editor of the open access journal Modern Languages Open (Liverpool University Press).

Carlotta Castellani (CIMA fellow) The political satire in Italy and in Germany during the Red Biennium: Mario Sironi and

This proposed paper focuses on the language of political satire developed in Italy and in Germany by George Grosz and Mario Sironi. Even at the time of their artistic debuts, both artists produced graphic works for illustrated magazines. For both, this activity soon became specifically an engagement in caricature and political satire. This paper aims to explore the particular illustrative idiom that the two artists, despite their geographical distance and opposing political backgrounds, seem to have shared in the period between 1919–1921. Both

nourished by a similar intolerance for the political situation following the First World War, the two artists worked in a context of civil, economic and political crisis. If this was the critical political substratum shared by many European countries after WWI, a second element allows us to compare the images produced by Sironi and Grosz. This second aspect is related to the shared imagery of technology, industrialization, as well as of the alienation of the “New Man” on display in the industrial cities. Analyzing the illustrations produced by Mario Sironi for the magazine "I. I. I. - Illustrated Italian Industries” and by Grosz for the satirical newspapers "Der Gegner,” the paper tracks down a specific shared language, characterized not by stylistic analogies, but by the presence of similar iconography. In examining these works produced for magazines, this paper draws attention to the existence of a common visual culture that should be reconsidered as a phenomenon beyond national borders.

Carlotta Castellani is an Italian art historian specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. She obtained her PhD in 2016 in Art History, Literature and Cultural Studies in a joint program with the Universities of Florence and Paris IV Sorbonne with a dissertation on “The myth of the artist and of the work in Balzac’s Le chef d’œuvre inconnu.” She is currently completing a book on this subject in collaboration with co-editor Max Seidel. Since 2014, she has been responsible for the historical archive of the German artist residency Villa Romana (C. Castellani, Il Salone Villa Romana. Uno spazio espositivo internazionale nella Firenze anni Ottanta curato da Katalin Burmeister. Ricostruzione di un archivio, Gli Ori, 2017). Since 2017, she has been an associate scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck- Institut. Her recent publications include a book on the German avant-garde journal “G. Material zur elementaren Gestaltung edited in Berlin between 1923–1926” (Una rivista costruttivista nella Berlino degli anni Venti. «G» di Hans Richter, Cleup, 2018). As fellow at CIMA, Carlotta studies the activity of Mario Sironi as a caricaturist in the period between 1915 and 1921, with a particular attention to his involvement in 1920 in the magazine directed by Umberto Notari «I.I.I. Le Industrie Italiane Illustrate».

Maria Elena Versari (Carnegie Mellon University) “Chiriko wird Akademikprofessor. Expectations, Misunderstandings and Appropriations of Pittura Metafisica in the 1920s European Avant-Garde”

This presentation tackles a subject that has been overlooked by scholars until now, namely, the peculiar confluence of , Pittura Metafisica and Dadaism and its impact on the 1920s avant-garde. The paper focuses on the reception of Pittura Metafisica in avant-garde circles outside Italy and retraces the interpretations of the Italian trend, highlighting the effects that a series of misunderstandings of its theoretical and ideological positions had on the aesthetic definitions of several avant-garde artists. It addresses the way in which the image of Pittura Metafisica was conflated with the legacy of Futurism and with scattered information on coming from Russia. This unstable conceptual merger, in turn, resulted in a new wave of reflections that compelled major German Dadaists such as Georg Grosz, , Hannah Höch and to reconsider the role of and visual distortion within a specifically modernist idiom. Finally, this presentation will offer a new interpretation of the writings of Aldo Camini, the least studied among the avant-garde personas created by 's . By reconstructing the unorthodox fortuna experienced by Pittura Metafisica abroad, my work will provide a reassessment of its central role in the 1920s debates on avant-garde identity.

Maria Elena Versari is a Visiting Professor of Art History and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore, where she received a PhD in Art History with a doctoral dissertation devoted to the international relations of Futurism. She has published two monographs, Constantin Brancusi (Florence, 2005) and e l’astrattismo (Florence 2007; French tr. 2008; Portuguese tr. 2011), edited the republication of Ruggero Vasari’s Futurist dystopian dramas L’angoscia delle macchine e altre sintesi futuriste (Palermo 2009) and has written extensively on Futurism, Avant-garde internationalism, , Fascist aesthetics and architecture, and twentieth-century sculpture. In 2016, she edited and co-translated the first English-language edition of Boccioni's 1914 Futurist Painting Sculpture for the Getty Research Institute Publications and has co-curated Totally Lost, an EU- sponsored exhibition devoted to totalitarian architecture and urban memory involving 186 international photographers and mapping 300 locations worldwide. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled The Foreign Policy of the Avant-garde and pursuing research for a second book on political iconoclasm in the 20th century.

Filippo Bosco (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) «Italienspielerei»: Italian and German painting from metafisica to Magischer Realismus

The relationships between Italian pittura metafisica and German Neue Sachlichkeit have mostly been described in two ways: as the “history of an influence,” referring to the knowledge of De Chirico and Carrà among Grosz and other painters working in Munich and Berlin in 1919; or as “similar paths,” pointing out the autonomy of German early objectivity of Davringhausen or Schrimpf. The aim of this paper is to show that the relationship between these two modes of expression is, in fact, biunivocal, underlining figurative intercourses on both sides of their transnational encounter. I will consider the reception of the exhibition “Das Junge Italien” (1921) that showed postwar Italian art in Germany. Theodor Däubler’s writings and the early contributions by Franz Roh recognized how Valori Plastici group was linked to the rising idea of “objectivity” in Germany. Then I will focus on the category of elaborated by Roh in his important 1925 book Nach-Expressionismus, in which Metaphysical artworks play a central role as the roots of many features of the new painting. Many Italian artists were fascinated by metafisica as well as by contemporary German art. This mutual relationship can explain the internal coherence of Roh’s Magischer Realismus, shedding light to the lasting value of Metaphysical international language.

Filippo Bosco is a PhD candidate at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. His research, supervised by Flavio Fergonzi, deals with the problem of drawing in Italian in the ’70. From 2013 to 2018, he completed his B. A. and Masters degrees in at the University of Pisa and at the Scuola Normale, submiting the dissertation Notes on Magic Realism. German and Italian painting in the Twenties. In 2018 he spent a semester at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His field of interest includes Italian art criticism and painting between XIX and XX century, Felice Casorati (Portraiture Conference, Durham 2018) and Giuseppe Penone’s graphic work (Studi di Memofonte, 2019). After co-curating a temporary exhibition (Protoballa: young Balla in , 2016) and the permanent collection (2017) in the Modern Art Gallery in Turin, he now collaborates with the editors of the catalogue of the Cerruti Collection in Rivoli.

5 – 6pm: Prosecco aperitivo reception

6 – 7.30pm KEYNOTE LECTURE

Mia Fuller (University of Berkeley) The Metafisica Solution: How to Discuss Fascist-Era Architecture Without Controversy

The term ‘metaphysical’ associated with the paintings of de Chirico and Carrà has, beyond its origins in the early twentieth century, played an epiphenomenal role in post-World War II discussions of fascist-era architecture. Finding the 1934 Rationalist-designed town of Sabaudia too ‘good’ simply to be called ‘fascist,’ in the 1970s intelligentsia figures Pasolini and Moravia whitewashed the regime from it rhetorically, using the term città metafisica to describe the town and thereby placing it in an artificially apolitical zone of architectural history. In my talk I will trace this use of ‘metaphysical’ up through the architectural publications that popularized it through the 2000s, avoiding discussions about political origins and with them, political legacies. I will contextualize my presentation visually through a range of designs created in Italy under fascism, and in the Italian colonies. Finally, I will turn to recent controversies in Italy regarding the continued uses of fascist-era buildings and monuments.

Mia Fuller is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California - Berkeley. She is a cultural anthropologist and urban-architectural historian who has published extensively on architecture and city planning in the Italian colonies, winning the International Planning History Society book prize for Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (published by Routledge in 2007). She has also written on post-Italian Libya; how Eritrea capitalizes on the built environment left behind; and the historiography of Italian architecture and the arts under fascism. Her research has been supported by a Rome Prize, a Fulbright Grant, and Fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Professor Fuller is currently in residence at the National Humanities Center working on a book on the force (or lack of force) of old fascist symbols that still exist in Italy, especially in the Pontine Marshes area, where Mussolini’s largest land-reclamation project took place in the 1930s. This is a long-term project involving intermittent ethnographic fieldwork – started twenty years ago – as well as memory studies, the historical sociology of migration, oral history, and theories of monumentality.

Saturday, April 27

10 am – 10.20am Metaphysical Masterpieces exhibition viewing and registration

10.20am – 11am SPECIAL PERFORMANCE EVENT Poetry reading with Gabriele Tinti & Vincent Piazza, The nostalgia of the poet, an homage to Giorgio de Chirico

11 am – 13pm Metaphysical Art and Literature (Chair: Erica Bernardi) Followed by Q&A

Damian Dombrowski (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany) “Sentimento del contrario:” De Chirico’s irony and Pirandello’s “umorismo”

The architectural language and color scheme of De Chirico’s Piazze Italiane is codified in terms of national identity. They reveal the artificial character of the young Italian state, dealing with the precarious hiatus between the pathetic and the ridiculous, and suggesting that the construct named "" was, in reality, insubstantial. De Chirico shared this interest, including its ironic refraction, with who is widely acknowledged as a writer- philosopher, and just like De Chirico considered himself a painter-philosopher. Through a comparative analysis of Pirandello’s 1908 essay L’umorismo, and the paintings and writings of De Chirico's metaphysical period, the proposed paper aims to map out an elective affinity between the painter's aesthetics and the author’s theoretical viewpoint. With similar diction the two specify an Italian sense of tragedy as a precondition for ironic art. Most strikingly, Pirandello’s rejection of logic reads like an anticipation of De Chirico’s theory of the “aspetto spettrale,” made visible by the metaphysical artwork. Hence, this paper is an attempt to enlarge the range of De Chirico’s spiritual sources, often one-sidedly identified with German (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), by an Italian element, which may have had an even greater impact on his visual thinking.

Damian Dombrowski is an Associate Professor of art history and the Director of the Martin von Wagner Museum of the University of Würzburg. He has written numerous books and articles on a wide range of topics: late-medieval sculpture in Italy and Germany; Botticelli; Raphael; cross-cultural exchange between Italy and Germany in the Renaissance (especially sculpture and urbanism); German art and architecture, c. 1600; sculpture, especially Bernini; Neapolitan ; Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; Paul Cézanne; Modern Italian Painting (nineteenth and twentieth century), especially De Chirico. He is also editor of Kunst auf der Suche nach der Nation. Das Problem der Identität in der italienischen Malerei, Skulptur und Architektur vom Risorgimento bis zum Faschismus (2013), containing his monographic essay “Identität und Ironie in De Chiricos Chant d’amour.”

Irena Kossowska (Copernicus University, Torun) In Search for a “New Man”: Bruno Schulz and Giorgio de Chirico.

The proposed paper focuses on the interpretation of the category of the ‘new man’ in the art and writings of Bruno Schulz and Giorgio de Chirico. Formulated by the neo-realists, who themselves referred to the philosophical theses of Miguel de Unamuno, Oswald Spengler, and José Ortega y Gasset, the concept of the ‘new man’ stemmed from an optimistic view of the industrialized world by the interwar avant-garde and also within the catastrophic diagnosis of dehumanized reality. Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer and printmaker of Jewish descent, who was active in the provincial city of Drohobych, ranked among the generation of magic-realists who paraphrased the art of the old masters in order to comment on contemporary reality and its archetypical core. Debora Vogel, a Jewish writer and philosopher, who befriended Schulz, observed connections between Schulz’s poetics and the art of Georg Grosz, a preeminent protagonist of . This paper will analyze the sources of Vogel's conclusions. Grosz namely distinguished Giorgio de Chirico as the author of the dummy paradigm (an incarnation of the concept of the new man). It is in the latter’s oeuvre and reflection on art that I will seek a deep analogy with the artistic attitude of the author of the Cinnamon Shops.

Irena Kossowska is a Professor of Art History at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. She has also lectured at the Warsaw University, the School for Humanities, Collegium Civitas, Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She

specializes in the field of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual arts, art theory, and criticism in Europe. She has received numerous awards and fellowships from institutions including the Bogliasco Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.), the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Munich), the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina), the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), the Institute (Leeds), and the British Academy (London). She has written extensively on Polish and European art, in publications including Artistic Reconquest: Art in Interwar Poland and Europe (2017), The Search for Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe 1919–2014 (2015), and Young Poland (2010); Reinterpreting the Past: Traditionalist Artistic Trends in Central and Eastern Europe of the 1920s and 1930s (2010), Bruno Schulz: El pais tenebroso (2007); Tadeusz Makowski (2006); Medieval and Modern: Direct Carving in the Work of Gill and Barlach (2005); Witold Wojtkiewicz: une fable polonaise (2004); Le Symbolisme polonaise (2004); Polonia fin de siglo 1890–1914 (2002); The Beginnings of Polish Original Printmaking 1897–1917 (2000).

Renato Barilli (University of Bologna) Italian Art in the ’20s and ’70s: Affinities and Differences

Seeing as CIMA’s programming this season examines trends in Italian art during the 1920s (i.e. including Metapysical painting, Novecento, “rappel á l’ordre,” etc.), it could be compelling to establish some affinities between the creations of this time and those produced nearly sixty years after, in the 1970s. As is well known, artists of the ’20s – and especially the protagonists of Futurism (i.e. Carlo Carrà, , Mario Sironi, etc.), the decade’s most advanced avant- garde movement – primarily concerned themselves with a process of abandonment, of inverting their attention from the present in order to retrieve the past and recuperate the masterpieces found in museums. This retrospective impulse resulted from the influence of Giorgio de Chirico who, wholly confident in proceeding down his own artistic path, wished to conceive “originary” solutions (i.e., connected to the origins), rather than “original” ones. The same creative impetus laid at the foundation of Arte povera, a movement established decades later whose founder, , in fact, was tempted to declare the movement a “New” Futurism. From this very advanced group there emerged yet another contrary spirit, represented in the work of Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro, and especially the young Salvo. Unlike those associated with Arte povera, this last artist refused to condemn color and opted instead to introduce an exceptionally brilliant “palette,” that brought to mind colored images on TV and, especially, the naive world of cartoons. Almost immediately after Salvo, Luigi Ontani embarked on this same path: his colored photographs seemed dedicated to resurrecting the historical (or folkloric) figures contained in museums. Later another rich group of artists naturally emerged, to which I myself gave the name of Nuovi-Nuovi, built on the innovations of these two pioneers; however, almost simultaneously, another group (including Carlo Maria Mariani and Stefano Di Stasio) embraced the label of “anachronism” wherein the prefix “ana” proclaims going “á rebours” through the stream of time. Finally, in such a propitious situation, a third group was born: the Transavantguard (including Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Mimmo Paladino). Here again the prefix “trans” proclaims the artists’ refusal to respect the normal trend of time. All these very stimulating groups considered themselves to be under the protection of an eternally “revenant” de Chirico, who, while continuing his very coherent search of mythical origins, was ready to accept newer times, consisting in a spirit of lightness, of enchanted colorism, of irony, and of all aspects that would ultimately come to be considered deeply intrinsic to so-called .

Renato Barilli, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bologna, where he has taught for four decades, is one of the most important art historians and critics of the postwar period in Italy. He has pioneered the subject of “the phenomenology of style,” a field that focuses on the visual arts but extends as well into literature. His primary book on the topic, The Science of Culture and the Phenomenology of Styles, was published in English in 2012. A curator as well as the author of numerous essays and books, Barilli is particularly noted for his focus on postmodernism and the artistic movement he dubbed the Nuovi-Nuovi (the New New). He invites you to visit his blog, www.renatobarilli.it, where every Sunday he posts three essays linked to his prevailing interests in the visual arts, literary criticism, and politics.

Concluding Round Table with CIMA fellows